La Trobe University shifting workloads onto AWS

La Trobe University is pushing workloads into the cloud, as part of a multi-pronged “University of the Future” strategy.

The university partnered with Optus for the strategy, which was conceived when the onset of Covid-19 highlighted a need for La Trobe to modernise its business processes.

La Trobe is also pursuing a wireless-first connectivity strategy, and has rolled out a new contact centre.

Replacing its end-of-life data centres, which otherwise needed “considerable capital investments”, the university said 80 percent of its core server and storage infrastructure is now on a VMware cloud hosted on AWS.

The software-defined data centre model it now uses is more flexible and provides better business continuity.

The shift involved migrating 500 virtual machines to the cloud, and a backup-as-a-service platform covers the cloud infrastructure, the remaining on-premises infrastructure, and future public cloud workloads.

The university’s contact centre also moved to the cloud, using Optus’ Cloud Contact Centre running on the NICE CX One digital interaction platform.

Putting the contact centre in the cloud means agents can be deployed anywhere they have connectivity. 

The network revamp involved rolling out 4000 Cisco wi-fi 6 access points across seven campuses, in a software-defined network architecture, with the same vendor providing network security.

That gives students the same connectivity experience regardless of which campus they’re logging in from, Optus said.